The newest from Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar had its Midwest premiere at the Chicago International Film Festival this past week and it was notable for a host of reasons. For starters, it’s his first English-language film. Second, neither lead – Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton – are Spanish. Third, despite some excellent qualities and an intriguing premise, the film never quite gels the way the director’s best ones do. It’s a noble effort, particularly because the director is working far afield of his comfort zone, but this movie is more of a curiosity than a complete success.
Why does this film about dying, a subject that pops up in so many of Almodóvar’s movies, feel so stilted and mannered, like a 1980s Woody Allen film? Is it because Almodóvar isn’t working close to home? Or are his bold colors and audacious production design too obvious this time out? Does his style of writing banter play better with his more melodramatic style as is the norm? No matter, THE ROOM NEXT DOOR never quite feels right.
Even the setup feels a little ham-fisted. Ingrid (Moore), an author who writes about death, discovers from a mutual friend that her old chum Martha (Swinton), is in the hospital dying from cervical cancer. Ingrid visits and finds it difficult to adequately connect with her after 30 years apart, but Martha keeps calling her to come back for more visits. Soon, they’re thick as thieves again and the dying woman even asks her new BFF to assist her exit from the world on her terms, not cancer’s. She wants them to go away to an Airbnb where they can relax, chat, and bond before Martha’s big chill.
I couldn’t help but feel that Almodóvar’s 2022 masterpiece TALK TO HER had so much more to say about life and death than the rather pedantic pontificating offered up here. That movie which brought the filmmaker his second Oscar even managed to make a fantasy sequence with a miniature man crawling into a woman’s vagina play, but here the writer/director struggles to make something significant out of Sigrid Nunez’s novel What Are You Going Through. The banter between the two women is often dull. Their shared history isn’t all that fascinating outside of a shared lover (John Turturro plays that character, quietly stealing every scene he’s in). And Martha is such a cold, odd fish, it’s hard to feel as much for her as we should.
Even Almodóvar’s color schematics feel off as the symbolism seems murky. What does his use of the colors canary yellow and crimson red mean here? (Both women wear lipstick of that latter color and it flatters neither.) And the flashbacks showcasing Martha’s time as a war correspondent feel stagey and inauthentic, as do her wigs.
Some moments are moving, and the editing and camerawork are elegant throughout, but the film never delivers the knockout punch it should, given its subject. At the end of the day, THE ROOM NEXT DOOR did make me want to watch TALK TO HER again. And I did. If only this new film was as involving, striking, and emotionally wrenching as that one.